Don't Pay Them, Pay Us!

"We have the answer!" scream the multitudes of election-year
politicians.

"We have the solution!" write the editors, the despondent parents,
and the grumbling teachers.

Yes, the qualified and unqualified alike publicize their personal
solutions to our nation's educational woes. You've heard them all
before--teacher-competency tests, across-the-board pay increases,
longer school days, merit pay, stricter Orwellian discipline, prayer a
la Reagan, and the back-to-basics movement. These solutions are all
wrong, of course, because they are far too complex to put into action
and much too theoretical. Luckily, I've arrived at a simple solution
that cannot help but work: Pay the students. It can't fail.

Do you complain that your English students wouldn't know William
Faulkner from Larry Flint? Do you wonder how to reach your students?
Think for a moment about a language they all understand. Money. Let's
not underestimate the power that these little green bills exert on our
very souls. The wish for money causes adults to do some pretty strange
things. They start wars over money. They get ulcers. They chew
Excedrin.

Teen-agers cannot quite reach this level of blind determination, but
they come very close. Think how hard your babysitter works for the
measly $2 an hour you pay her. Remember 12-year-old Tommy next door who
was stupid enough to mow your 5-acre front lawn with a push lawnmower
in the middle of last summer's heat wave--all for $5 and a glass of
watery Kool-Aid. If children are willing to be exploited for so little,
don't you think they would sit in an air-conditioned classroom if it
would make them a fast buck?

I considered rewarding students with the date of their choice, but
this raised some tricky moral questions. If we pay students, however,
all we do is create a national debt. That's no big deal; politicians
have been doing it for years.

Launching the plan is simple. You pay students on the basis of their
grades or time spent in school. Personally, I think a mixture of the
two would be best. Each student would start at the minimum wage. If, at
the end of one semester, Joe Student had earned a 4.0 grade-point
average, his salary would be raised to $6 an hour. If he produced a B
average, he'd receive $4.50 an hour. For a C average, Joe would stay at
the minimum wage, and for a D average, we start cutting his income. If
he happened to fail ... well, I guess we boot him out into the cruel
world.

Just imagine: No one would skip class, because he or she would lose
an hour's pay. There would be no discipline problem, either. Principals
would only need to threaten to kick the offensive student out of school
and he or she would shape up immediately.

Logically, some incentives would need to be created to get
teen-agers to take challenging courses like elementary analysis and
physics. I believe a bonus of $250 per semester for these courses would
ensure overflowing classrooms. Students would prefer to take full
schedules for they would make the most money this way. Inadvertently,
through all this academic exposure, students would learn. If you think
the Renaissance was big, wait until "pay-school" goes into effect.

Various desirable spin-offs would result from this program as well.
Imagine the close parent/child relationships that would develop as Mr.
Jones decides to ask 12-year-old Tommy to float him a loan.

If schools extended this system to cover extracurricular activities,
the world would see a blossoming of all aspects of American cultural
life. More people would try out for school plays than could possibly
fit in the audience. You would see high-school sports more exciting
than ever because each player would be striving to do his very best to
receive the Christmas bonus of $500. And finally, student pay would
produce an incredible number of qualified scientists, philosophers, and
economists--because the easiest way to get another dollar to play video
games would be to get an A in chemistry and business.

Granted, there would be a few problems. Children would be trampled
in the evening rush to get to the library and study. Teachers would go
sleepless because all those papers that actually came in on time would
need grading. Yet these are only minor problems and could easily be
overcome with a little thought.

So forget about prayer in school and forget about teacher-competency
tests. There is a simple solution: student salaries. Does this say
something about college as well? Wouldn't this sort of system work
there, too?

Let's not get carried away ...

Leonard Duncan won first place in Time magazine's 1984 Education Program Student Writing Contest with this essay. Today, he is a freshman studying chemistry at the University of Iowa.

Vol. 04, Issue 25, Page 17

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